Fifty-Two Stories

“Don’t love you…don’t love you!” he went on breathlessly. “You’re immoral, soulless…Don’t you dare go around in that rain cape! Do you hear me? I’ll tear it to shreds…”

“Calm down, child!” Maman began to cry. “The coachman will hear you!”

“Where’s my father’s fortune? Where’s your money? You squandered it all! I’m not ashamed of my poverty, but I am ashamed to have such a mother…When my comrades ask about you, I always blush.”

By train the town was two stops away. Volodya stood all the while at the rear of the car and trembled all over. He did not want to go into the car, since his mother, whom he hated, was sitting there. He hated himself, the conductors, the smoke of the engine, the cold, which he thought was the cause of his trembling…And the heavier his heart became, the more strongly he felt that somewhere in this world, among some people, there was a pure, noble life, warm, refined, filled with love, tenderness, gaiety, freedom…He felt it, and his yearning was so strong that one of the passengers, looking him closely in the face, even asked:

“Maybe you have a toothache?”

In town maman and Volodya lived with Marya Petrovna, a gentlewoman who rented a big apartment and took in tenants. Maman rented two rooms: in the one with windows, where her bed stood and two paintings in gilt frames hung on the walls, she herself lived; and in the other, adjacent, small and dark, lived Volodya. Here stood the sofa he slept on, and there was no other furniture; the whole room was taken up by hampers full of clothes, hat boxes, and all sorts of junk that maman kept for some reason. Volodya did his homework in his mother’s room or the “common room”—so the large room was called where the tenants all gathered at dinnertime and in the evenings.

Returning home, he lay down on the sofa and covered himself with a blanket to calm his trembling. The hat boxes, hampers, and junk reminded him that he had no room of his own, no shelter where he could hide from maman

, from her guests, and from the voices that were now coming from the common room; the satchel and books scattered in the corners reminded him of the examination he had not taken…For some reason, quite beside the point, he recalled Menton, where he had lived with his late father when he was seven years old; he remembered Biarritz and two little English girls he used to run with in the sand…He wanted to refresh his memory of the color of the sky and the ocean, the height of the waves, and his mood at that time, but he did not succeed; the little English girls flashed in his imagination as if alive, but all the rest became confused and dissolved in disorder…

“No, it’s cold here,” Volodya thought, got up, put on his overcoat, and went to the common room.

In the common room they were having tea. Three people were sitting by the samovar: maman; a music teacher, a little old lady in tortoiseshell pince-nez; and Avgustin Mikhailych, an elderly, very fat Frenchman, who worked at a perfume factory.

“I had no lunch today,” maman was saying. “We’ll have to send the maid for bread.”

“Douniache!” the Frenchman cried.

It turned out that the landlady had sent the maid somewhere.

“Oh, that signifies nothing,” the Frenchman said with a big smile. “I’ll go myself right now for bread. Oh, it’s nothing!”

He laid his strong, stinking cigar in a conspicuous place, put on his hat, and left. On his departure, maman started telling the music teacher how she had visited the Shumikhins and how well she had been received there.

“Lily Shumikhin is my relative…,” she said. “Her late husband, General Shumikhin, was my husband’s cousin. She herself was born Baroness Kolb…”

“Maman

, that’s not true!” Volodya said irritably. “Why lie?”

He knew perfectly well that maman was telling the truth: there was not a single lying word in her story about General Shumikhin and the born Baroness Kolb, but nonetheless he still felt she was lying. The lie was felt in her manner of speaking, in the expression of her face, in her gaze, in everything.

“You’re lying!” Volodya repeated and pounded on the table so hard that all the china trembled and maman’s tea splashed out. “Why do you go telling about generals and baronesses? It’s all lies!”

The music teacher was taken aback and coughed into her handkerchief, making it look as if she was choking, and maman burst into tears.

“Where can I go?” thought Volodya.